Windows Mobile 7, which may debut next month, was allegedly handled by Russian Windows Mobile newshound Eldar Murtazin, and he's talking. There was no mention of the futuristic "gestures" we heard about before, but it was heavy on the Zune:

The UI, you see, was actually "more complicated" than the ZuneHD. There's not much more elaboration on that point, but we are told the menus were similar to the ZuneHD and feature horizontal navigation. Nevertheless, this data meshes with earlier reports about a "Zune phone."

Wrote Murtazin, by way of that zany Twitter service, the UI seemed heavily inspired by Android 2.1 and the iPhone. That said, familiar mobile standby features like soft keys and click and hold were also on hand.

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Lastly, we had reported earlier that users wouldn't be able to upgrade from 6.5 to 7 because of the new gesture controls, and that appears to be corroborated by the latest rumors here. Murtazin said that none of the 6.x apps worked on the handset he was using (an unidentified, unreleased phone), and the OS appeared to be "built from scratch." Keep an eye out at the Mobile World Conference for more. [WM Power User]